Category - programming
Puffy and Chrome OS
About ten years ago, Tim O’Reilly made the claim that web apps circumvented copyleft licenses, since they were a distribution channel of sorts, but were not required to distribute the source of their applications. At this point, i had an iota of a notion.
A few years later, Google released GMail (beta). I watched as dozens of my friends, who were diehard FLOSS folks, and who wouldn’t trust Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle with their desktops or servers, happily started trusting Google with their personal information and conversations. At this point, i had a musing…
Completed on July 8, 2009
First steps with HPDF
I’ve been fiddling with HPDF for a new project, and ran into a bit of a documentation barrier. So i’m writing down some notes, which may some day lead to a better-documented, higher-level HPDF wrapper.
First off, let’s write a very minimal pdf…
Completed on July 7, 2009
Rant or die redux
A recent article was a repost. And it was a rant, pure and simple. Still, there was some substance to it, and it’s worth revisiting after four and a half years.
At the time, i was in a full-time position, working exclusively with Perl (and, consequently, with other Perl programmers). I was working with Python on hobby projects. Sometimes, familiarity breeds contempt. I’m a freelancer now, no longer tied to a specific language. I do still work with Perl occasionally, but more of my time is spent with Ruby, Python, Haskell, and occasionally Java. I’ve mellowed quite a bit on the subject, though my opinions are still of the same flavor.
My criticisms centered around two things: the syntax (which is pretty clear from the article) and the community (which might not be obvious). Let’s talk about the syntax first….
Completed on September 20, 2007
$self->rant('perl') or die;
This entry was originally posted on February 7th, 2003 (honestly, check the wayback machine). It was the most popular of my articles at the time, but fell off the web when my site went down temporarily. Now it’s back. The formatting has changed, and some links have been updated, but it is otherwise uncut.
Perl. I really dislike Perl. I also get my paycheck by programming in it, so i force myself to deal. But i really dislike it.
The typing system is bad…
Completed on September 12, 2007